“I already know that,” she interrupts.

“All right then,” he says calmly. “Then let’s look at it another way. I don’t know what to expect.”

“I’m not exactly an expert either.”

“Not only with you,” he continues stubbornly, “but with the pregnancy. You’ve told me you experience terrible nausea, but I’m reluctant to give you anything to stop it because I don’t know how you’ll react. I don’t know your physiology, and with a child inside you, assuming you intend to keep it, there are tremendous risks involved in giving you any kind of prescription medication.”

He stops, waiting for her to say something, but Mooney is silent. She doesn’t know what to say. She thought he would be as excited as she is — not only does he now have a vampire patient, but a pregnant one, at that. She feels embarrassed when she realizes that her assumption about that was immature, something that would come from a teenager rather than a young woman who’s undergoing massive bodily changes. If she changes her perspective, she sees that Dr. Guarin is not a young man; he is in his mid-fifties, unimaginative and complacent. He is used to nice, predictable clientele who bring him head colds, diabetes, an occasional broken arm or perhaps alcohol abuse, and he no doubt likes it that way. Her rape last summer was probably the worst thing he’s seen in years.

The minutes tick past and at last he tells her, “You need to go somewhere where they have the resources to help you, like Tucson or Phoenix. I don’t know if they’ve had any cases as a result of the virus or not, but either way — ”

“I’m not leaving Sells,” she cuts in. “There’s nowhere else for me to go. No one will take me in, you know that. As it is, I’ll be eighteen in January. The state will stop paying foster support and Mother Gaso will put me out of her house. I won’t have any medical insurance.” This is just a fraction of the things that have been going through her mind, the same deliberations that she realizes adults dealt with constantly, a life-load of responsibilities, worries, and if-thens, then-thats. It stings to spell it out to this man who is only slightly more than a stranger, but he has to know why. She doesn’t know him that well, but in the months to come he may be the only person who will stand by her side, even if he isn’t on her side.

“I can’t say for certain, but my guess is the government can be convinced to treat you for free.”

Mooney feels her face flush and her pulse rate triples. She wills herself to stay in control before the feeling can escalate to the fury that she experienced last week with Mother Gaso when the woman called her unborn child it. He is only laying out options but he has not thought things through. The dual surprise of discovering the changes Mooney has undergone has not given him the time needed to do that. At least this is what she tells herself, and it is enough to cool her down and make her heartbeat drop back to something vaguely normal … whatever that is for her now.

“No,” she says with utter finality. “If I do that, it’s just like donating my body to science. They’ll lock me away in some medical facility and God only knows what they’ll do to me in the name of finding a ‘cure.’ You’ve seen the panic and heard the whacked-out stories. The news reports air them for sensationalism, and the fact that they retract them the next day or say they were just rumors doesn’t do any good. It’s like uploading a picture of yourself naked on the Facebook, then taking it down. Once it’s up there, it’s there forever.” She sit there quietly for a few seconds, then adds in a soft voice, “And what do you think they’ll do to my baby in the name of science, Dr. Guarin?”

It is only a slight change of expression, but Mooney picks up on it. Oddly, she can also smell something different, a spike in pheromones that her senses register as fear. For her? If so, it is the first time anyone in Sells has ever exhibited anything resembling sympathy for her.

He looks down at the papers on his desk again, flips one up and scans it, then another, and another. “I don’t know what to give you for the nausea,” he says again. His next words are enough to make her raise her eyebrows, but the fact that he won’t look up indicates he’s completely serious. “Have you tried rare meat? Really rare? I can’t recommend raw — everything I’ve been taught just won’t let me do that. But your physiology, what I’ve read in the science journals, it all seems to indicate …” His voice trails off but he doesn’t need to finish for Mooney to understand.

“No,” she answers. “I haven’t. Mother Gaso buys the groceries. She gets the money from the state for me. It’s not a lot so we don’t eat fancy. I don’t get much spending money.”

Dr. Guarin nods. “I understand that, but she needs to rethink your diet. You’re bordering on malnutrition, Mooney. Instinct tells me a normal diet isn’t supplying you with what your body needs. If this continues, your baby may not get enough nutrients. You could miscarry or worse.”

“Worse?”

“The child could be born prematurely, underdeveloped, or even deformed. I just don’t know. But it’s not worth taking the chance.” He finally looks up at her. “It doesn’t have to be steak. Hamburgers, whatever’s on sale. As rare as you can make it and still get a little cooking heat on it.” He puts the papers in a file with her name on it, then closes the folder and runs a finger across the calendar pad on his desk. He picks up a pencil and writes her name on the pad. “I want to see you in two weeks, sooner if you don’t get any better. Just stop by after your last class. And remember —

“Rare, red meat. Lots of it.”

— 9 —

The thing with the rabbit happens so fast that Mooney doesn’t even know what she’s doing until it’s done.

Mother Gaso tries, more than Mooney expects. She expects the old woman to disregard Dr. Guarin’s instructions, especially since red meat is so expensive — money is always the driving force in their existence. Mooney thinks her guardian probably doesn’t give a bat’s ass whether Mooney is healthy or not, and she certainly doesn’t care about some vampire baby (or whatever she and the other old cronies in town are calling it these days). But no matter what Mother’s Gaso’s personal opinions are, the day after Mooney relays the doctor’s instructions a cheap, family-sized package of ground beef appears in the refrigerator and suddenly there is meat on her plate at every meal. As Dr. Guarin had suggested, it isn’t the expensive stuff — just a quarter-pound patty, cooked on the outside, bloody on the inside.

At first it’s good, better than it has been … but not as good as it should be. The meat is okay, but the blood — and this is a hard thing for Mooney to admit — is better. She works it in her mouth, savoring the flavor and the juice, before finally swallowing; the urge to vomit every time she eats subsides, but never truly disappears. She feels better after each meal, ultimately eating the meat and leaving the rest, the beans, the rice, the fry bread, until the old woman no longer puts them on her plate at all. It’s not a miracle cure but almost immediately Mooney fills out a little. She no longer feels like she’s starving, going through each day like some sort of high-functioning shadow of herself that watches while her body consumes itself but her belly gets bigger.

And then, the rabbit.

She is three days away from her appointment with Dr. Guarin when it darts across the road in front of her on her way home from class. One moment it’s a gray-coated blur four feet away —

The next her teeth are buried in its neck.

Her backpack lies in the dust where she dropped it. She’s standing at the side of the road and sucking on the bunny like it’s a popsicle and she’s a thirsty kid on a hundred and ten degree afternoon. The taste that fills her mouth is salty, thick and heavily metallic, with a texture like hot gravy. It is unlike anything she’s ever had and it slides down her throat, coating the hollowness that has been deep in her core for months and wiping it out of existence.

It is the best thing she’s ever had.

The gamey smell of the rabbit fills her nostrils and she presses the animal’s fur tighter against her face and revels in it, pulling harder at the bite she’s made in its flesh. It kicks in her grip and the movement does something — pumps adrenaline into the animal’s bloodstream, perhaps — to the flavorful liquid sliding down her throat, making it even better. Mooney doesn’t know how long it takes for her to drain the creature, but it seems like only seconds. When she lifts her mouth from its throat, her lips, tongue and hands are tingling, and her fingertips have become so screamingly sensitive that she can literally feel the small carcass already cooling beneath its fur. She stares at it for a moment, then flings it into the desert for the scavengers to take care of, watching impassively as the effortless flip of her wrist sends it sailing at least forty feet before it disappears into the waist-high scrub.

For the first time since before she learned she was pregnant, Mooney isn’t sick to her stomach. She feels halfway decent for a change, not entirely satisfied but not precisely hungry, either — it’s as though she’s been given half a sandwich when what she really needed was the whole thing. She’s not a fool and she knows what this means, even if she hasn’t been willing to acknowledge it.

Until now.

There is a part of herself, the human part that has controlled her existence until very recently, that views the idea of drinking human blood as disgusting and vaguely filthy. The new part of her, the DNA-activated mystery creature who just had its first decent meal, finds it so appealing that her mouth instantly waters. A thousand horror movie images flip through her mind like a slide show on warp speed, and they all end in splatter and gore and death. Does she really want to go there, to kill other human beings in order to sustain herself? Although small by comparison, the rabbit has made her realize that she can likely do just that to anyone without much effort. She has the speed, the strength, the bite, and instinct tells her that the more she feeds on what she really needs — blood — the stronger she will get. But as much as she despises almost everyone in town, there is no one in Sells she hates so much that they warrant dying.